Generally test equipment for various units under test includes a test chassis or primary test instrument, such as for example, a PXI chassis and corresponding control electronics. In some instances the PXI chassis is housed within an environmental housing to protect the PXI chassis from the test environment making connections between a unit under test and the PXI chassis difficult. Conventional environmental housings and the connection to the unit under test provided using the conventional environmental housings are either complicated or are not easily expanded for future applications due to, for example, intensive wiring connections and the customized nature of those connections. With conventional test equipment, once a major test platform is fielded it may be difficult to make additions to the test station to address future technical needs, due to, for example inflexibility of test station hardware and software and the cost(s) involved in making such a change. For example, in one aspect straight through wiring is utilized to connect the primary test instrument to connectors disposed on the front panel of a test instrument interface. The straight through wiring does not lend itself to easy expansion for new capabilities and it makes repair/maintenance of the test system difficult as removal of the circuit cards from the primary test instrument requires removing the wiring and manipulating the cards through an opening in the environmental housing. In another aspect, to connect the primary test instrument to the unit under test, a mass interconnect panel is utilized however, utilization of the mass interconnect panel involves increased cost to the end user due to, for example, use of unique interface adapters (to which test equipment interfaces are mounted) that are required to connect the test equipment interfaces to the housing for each system, which are not easily updated in the field for new applications.
It would be advantageous to have a flexible chassis interface device that provides capability to expand, change and/or reconfigure a testing system while making the testing system more maintainable and repairable.